Personal
Tree married actress Helen Maud Holt (1863–1937) in 1882; she often played opposite him and assisted him with management of the theatres. Her charm also assisted the couple's entry into prominent social and élite artistic and intellectual circles. Their daughters were actresses Viola Tree (who married theatre critic Alan Parsons) and Felicity Tree (who married Sir Geoffrey Cory-Wright, third baronet) and poet Iris Tree (who married Curtis Moffat, becoming Countess Ledebur). Tree also fathered several illegitimate children, including six with (Beatrice) May Pinney and other mistresses, including film director Carol Reed and Peter Reed, the father of the British actor Oliver Reed. He was also the grandfather of Hollywood screenwriter and producer Ivan Moffat and the great-great-grandfather of actress Georgina Moffat.
Tree founded the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in 1904. He also served as president of the Theatrical Managers' Association and assisted the Actors' Benevolent Fund and the Actors' Association. For his contributions to theatre, he was knighted in 1909. During World War I, Tree contributed his celebrity by delivering patriotic addresses. He wrote several books discussing the importance of the theatre and the arts in modern society.
Tree's last professional undertaking was a visit to Los Angeles in 1915 fulfilling a contract with a film company. He was in America for the greater part of 1915 and 1916. He returned to England in 1917 and died, aged 64, from pulmonary blood clots. According to writer Vera Brittain, he died suddenly in the arms of her friend, the novelist Winifred Holtby, then aged 19 and working as a nursing assistant at a fashionable London nursing home where Tree was recuperating from surgery to repair a broken leg. His remains were cremated, and his ashes rest at Hampstead cemetery.
Read more about this topic: Herbert Beerbohm Tree
Famous quotes containing the word personal:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox!”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“It is cowardly to fly from natural duties and take up those that suit our taste or temperament better; but it is also unwise to take an exaggerated view of personal duties, which shuts out the proper care of the mind and body entrusted to us.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)